Blogs

About this blog

Welcome to the Storage Management Blog, where you can read the perspectives from storage management experts. This Blog provides insights into the storage management solution, as well as technical details about specific IBM products.

Are you struggling with growing storage infrastructure costs? Do you stand up new storage arrays every time a new project requires capacity? Do you use spreadsheets and homegrown scripts to keep track of storage assets and utilization? Don't worry, IBM has a better way to manage storage without a complex, time-consuming deployment of software into your existing environment. To learn more, checkout the upcoming webcast, September 16, 1 PM EST , on IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights, a SaaS offering, from... [More]

The storage management functionality of IBM Spectrum Control ™ was improved in the current V5.2.7 release that is now available. Support was added for the newest software defined storage offering, IBM Spectrum Accelerate ™ , to the already comprehensive monitoring group and enhancements to IBM Spectrum Scale ™ , through the determination of nodes in your GPFS™ clusters that are designated as protocol nodes. Support was also added for viewing information about NPV links and Cisco F_port channels. For the downloads... [More]

The IBM Spectrum Control ™ Storage Insights SaaS offering model lends itself to more frequent, meaningful improvements for your consumer-oriented storage managing experience. Having said that, you spoke and Storage Insights listened! The first look Storage Insights Dashboard now offers a more informative and insightful perspective on your... [More]

The value of data is growing, yet visibility into today’s storage environments can be foggy and unclear—the result of expanding IT complexity, escalating user demands and exponential data growth. Many IT organizations lack a true understanding of their storage infrastructure, negatively impacting their ability to make informed decisions and causing storage utilization rates to hover around 50 percent. Manual storage management processes and the rapid deployments of mobile, social and cloud IT models compound the challenges. With the... [More]

As storage continues to grow in your environment, it is important to know how your storage is performing and that it is tiered correctly in order to reduce costs. The latest on-premises release of IBM Spectrum Control™ (IBM® Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center), a member of the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family, is now available. It is full of consumer oriented features and enhancements that provide the ability to monitor and manage your storage infrastructure efficiently. For the downloads for this release, see... [More]

On the opening day of IBM Edge 2015, Jamie Thomas, General Manager of IBM Storage and Software Defined Systems for IBM Systems, reiterated IBM's 1 billion dollar investment in storage software for hybrid cloud and announced some solutions among them a new SaaS offering, IBM Spectrum Control (TM) Storage Insights. ... [More]

The first time I met a mobile application was in 2008. I said to myself, “This is revolutionary and cool!" Since then, I’ve used hundreds of mobile applications. Some of them games, other business applications, but with both, I never really understand the revolution. It was in 2011 when I understood for the first time that it’s not just "cool" as I realized in 2008. I understood for the first time what this revolution meant. “A mobile app is a marketing tool!" "A mobile app can... [More]

If you wish to monitor capacity and troubleshoot performance of applications, understand the SAN resources that the applications are dependent on and monitor capacity usage at a department level, then checkout V5.2.5 of IBM Spectrum Control (IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center). In V5.2.5 of IBM Spectrum Control for you can: - Model applications in GPFS environments where filesets are primary containers of application storage. - View a hierarchy list to better understand the application and... [More]

YES!!! Not only is there a video that shows the GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale) related capabilities in IBM Spectrum Control (IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, V5.2.5), but its narrated by SME Christian Bolik, a member of the development team that deals primarily with GPFS functionality. When it comes to storage resources, IBM Spectrum Control revolves around the concept of storage systems. To accommodate this, a GPFS cluster is treated by IBM Spectrum Control as a file storage system, comparable to IBM Storwize V7000 Unified, or NetApp filers.... [More]

Determining when and how you are alerted to conditions and violations of performance thresholds within a storage environment is important to helping you maintain and administer storage resources. In Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, V5.2.5 (IBM Spectrum Control), the notification feature was improved to enable you to specify global settings for alert notifications in one, central location. Alerts can define notification actions that send email, generate Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, or generate IBM® Tivoli®... [More]

Optimize your storage infrastructure with data driven insights ! IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights is an analytics-driven, storage resource management solution that is delivered over the Cloud. The solution uses Cloud technology to provide visibility into on-premise storage – with the goal of helping clients optimize their storage environments in today's data-intense world. This SaaS solution running on SoftLayer can deploy in as little as 5 minutes and show actionable insights in 30 minutes. IBM Spectrum Control Storage... [More]

After the recent, very insightful, and extremely successful IBM InterConnect 2015 Conference in Las Vegas, IBM continues the momentum with the release of IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (IBM Spectrum Control), V5.2.5. In this release, the development team extends support for GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale) and adds even more user-friendly enhancements to augment your data collection; this marks the third consecutive release that feature enhancements, support, and user improvements were... [More]

We want to improve the wiki and to improve, we need your help. If you can give us 2 minutes (only 120 seconds!), we can make some meaningful changes. Here's the survey link: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1981235/Tivoli-Storage-Manager-wiki The survey will be active until 27 February. Thanks, in advance, for your help. We'll share what we learn so you can see the results.

REGISTER HERE for for the webcast “Eliminate the Barriers to Your Cloud Adoption” to learn more about how cloud storage can dramatically transform your organization’s agility and economics. Learn how IBM, our Technology Partners and clients are reinventing data availability for the hybrid cloud era, so you can embrace cloud with confidence.

Do you want help installing FlashCopy Manager for VMware with Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments? The latest installation cookbook is now available on the Tivoli Storage Manager website: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home/wiki/Tivoli Storage Manager/page/Data Protection for VMware This step-by-step guide is for a novice user to install FlashCopy Manager for VMware together with Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments.

The latest release of IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, V5.2.4 answers many of the monitoring questions a storage administrator might have about IBM General Parallel File Systems (GPFS™) by providing easily accessible views with pertinent information. How can I track the capacity trending for a GPFS file system? Which of my GPFS file systems are the closest to running out of space? On the Overview page, for the GPFS file system, the bar chart shows the Total file system capacity, and the Used / Available file system... [More]

Preview IBM Storage Insights to be released in 2015. Storage Insights is a new Software As A Service offering that combines IBM's expertise in data management, analytics and cloud - enabling clients to better manage their storage infrastructure through a Cloud-based delivery model. OK, go ahead and click the following link to see the preview: Video: Data Cloud Insights

An overview of the concepts of Software Defined Environments (SDE), Software Defined Storage (SDS), and how they all work together with SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center (VSC) are covered. The publication takes you through a systematic drill down of the architecture, components, and interfaces and gives the details of VSC and how to exploit it in your environment. THIS PUBLICATION provides practical scenarios for client VSC business environments, with focus on VSC component functionality, as well as real-life use cases to administer,... [More]